Campaign advocacy groups and PACs on both sides of the political spectrum have poured tens of millions of dollars into the confirmation process, according to an analysis of spending by Fox Business.
More than a dozen conservative and liberal political groups have announced that they are spending millions on campaign ads in battleground states using the topic of Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court.
A report from Fox Business on Friday specified where some of these donations were coming from and confirmed details from various Super PACs and advocacy groups.
President Trump announced Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court just over two weeks ago. Republicans have committed to getting her confirmed by the Senate before the election. A four-day Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for the conservative appellate court judge is beginning Monday.
According to Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham (R-SC), his committee will most likely vote on Barrett's nomination on Oct. 22, which will set up a vote on the Senate floor before the end of the month. According to Fox Business, Super PACs and "dark money groups" have spent millions on advertising in battleground states following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Super PACS and "dark water" organizations are ironically utilizing the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v FEC, which Ginsberg dissented from, to try and fill Ginsberg's seat.
Ginsberg later said it was the one Supreme Court case she wished she could have overturned.
"If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United," Ginsburg said in a 2014 interview. "I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be."
The conservative 501(c)(4) organization Club for Growth released an ad and one-page white paper on Thursday (Oct. 8) in anticipation of the confirmation hearing. According to Politico, "The Club for Growth is the pre-eminent institution promoting Republican adherence to a free-market, free-trade, anti-regulation agenda.
A Press release that accompanied the ad and white paper stated, "Judge Barrett will be a practical, pro-growth Justice that is willing to discard administrative action when necessary. She will interpret the law through the Constitution, and she will not legislate from the bench."
"We're seeing growing support for Judge Barrett's nomination," president of Club for Growth David Macintosh said Thursday.
Macintosh additionally wrote an op-ed for Fox Business and said about Judge Barrett, "She correctly places the Constitution itself above regulations, above acts of Congress, and above past Court decisions."
According to Fox Business, the non-profit organization and its Super PAC, Club for Growth Action, will spend $5 million for its most recent ad campaign.
The ad promotes Barrett's confirmation nationally and targets two recently vulnerable states -- Utah and Alaska. Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the libertarian political advocacy group funded by David and Charles Koch, also told FOX Business that they will be spending a "seven-figure" amount for digital ads in support for Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
200 conservative groups, including AFP, sent a letter to Lindsey Graham on Thursday and urged him and his colleagues in the Senate to confirm Barrett.
"Minutes after President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett, we launched a full scale grassroots campaign to mobilize our activists across the country and drive her confirmation to the high court," Casey Mattox, vice president for legal and judicial strategy with AFP, also told FOX Business.
Conversely, American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC, has already spent about $42 million on anti-Trump ads nationally through Friday. The super PAC's donations increase substantially daily, per The Center for Responsive Politics, a research organization that reports election funding using data from the Federal Elections Commission.
Just as conservative groups have taken issue with questions regarding Barrett's religious views, Democratic groups and PACs are worried about her previous stances on abortion and health care.
"Amy Coney Barrett is everything the current incarnation of the conservative legal movement has been working for - someone whose record, and the litmus tests of the president nominating her, suggest will overturn Roe, strike down the A.C.A., bend the law toward big business interests and make it harder to vote," Elizabeth B. Wydra, the president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, told the New York Times.
According to USA Today, As a law professor in 2006, Barrett signed an anti-abortion letter that was part of an ad in a newspaper that called for "an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade."
Although Barrett has said that precedent is not sacrosanct, she said in a 2016 talk at Jacksonville University in 2016 that the right to abortion may be safe but that the Supreme Court could uphold additional restrictions.
